Xbox - All Characters Gone After Connecting Steam Account

I've been playing early access since 12/6 on Xbox Series X but have lost access to all my characters since last night 1/9 after I also purchased early access for my new Steam Deck on Steam Client. I also linked my Steam account to my existing POE account thinking that would help my experience of playing my characters on both Steam Deck and Xbox and I am not sure if that also might have broken something.

I had the following characters on POE 2 -

Witch Level 75
Ranger Level 75
Monk Level 17

If i log into the POE site, it still shows my latest witch character in Standard League within the characters box.

I also see that on the POE site I have two accounts showing. Not sure if this has anything to do with the issue I am having. Please make this an official bug! I've seen other players reporting somewhat similar issues but not very much detail. I want nothing more than to support this game but losing two lvl 75 characters is devastating.

Update - For anyone reading this thread having a similar issue. I was able to resolve this by going onto my Xbox, choosing a new character, playing until Act 1's first town, exiting to character selection, log out, then log back in, and then having a drop-down appear above the character selection where I was able to select my original POE account associated to my POE 2 early access characters. My theory is when I connected my email address and Steam Account, it associated to or created a new instance for me in POE's servers of which I simply had to switch back to. The biggest frustration was how difficult it was for me to figure out that I had to do this in the first place. This drop-down for account selection is not easy to find. I have also verified with another player that they were able to use this same solution in PS5.